Personal Demons

by Phoebe Ravencraft

“And the Classic Breakfast with bacon,” she said, handing Devlin his food. “Did you guys need your coffee warmed?”

  “Yes, please,” I said.

  She grabbed a pot off the tray and topped me off. Devlin nodded wordlessly at her, and she refilled his cup as well.

  “Can I get you anything else at the moment?” she asked.

  “I’m good,” I said.

  “No, thank you,” Devlin said.

  “Okay, guys, enjoy!”

  She hustled off to her next table. I grabbed the syrup and practically drowned my French toast in it. Then I dug in.

  Dear God, it was orgasmic. Good food is always pleasurable, but when you’re really hungry? I swear, it’s better than sex.

  “Go on,” I prodded Devlin as he cut into the eggs-over-easy on his plate.

  “The day arrived for our raid,” he said, with another sigh. “We went at dawn, and we hid outside their settlement. We waited for the men to go off on a hunt. When they were gone, leaving their homes largely undefended, we struck.

  “We entered the settlement, and we raided their stores. We took their corn, their tools, their pelts. We destroyed their crops. We stole their blankets and their crafts. Anything that might have value, we took from them.

  “But Envy, like all the Deadly Sins, doesn’t work on its own. It doesn’t only concern itself with the desire for what someone else has. When you covet, you not only want the other person’s things, you are angry that they have them in the first place.

  “And when that kind of anger drives your actions, you seek to punish those who have what you want.

  “So, we committed atrocities against these people we thought were unjustly profiting. We tore apart their wigwams, snapping poles and shredding buckskin. We beat their children and the elderly. And we raped the women.

  “When we were finished wreaking horror upon these people, we told them to reject Satan, to turn away from darkness. We shouted that they had better accept Jesus, or God would burn them in Hell. And then we left them to their tears and their misery, as we congratulated ourselves on our victory and in bringing divine justice to the savages.”

  I stared glassy-eyed at Devlin. Horror held my brain in a death-grip. My ravenous appetite was suddenly gone, squelched by the terrible things he told me. Who the fuck was this guy?

  “But as I mentioned, we were not the only settlement victimized by this demonic game. The people whom we had terrorized were also selected as pawns. And they . . . their Deadly Sin was Wrath.

  “It can hardly be surprising that, when their men returned from the hunt and found their village in ruins, their families harmed, their goods stolen, that they went mad with anger. I’ve no way of knowing what the survivors told them, but if it was even half of the truth, it would have been enough to motivate them to revenge.

  “With relations between our peoples already strained, they had little reason to hesitate. And the weeping of their shattered women and children was all the fuel necessary.

  “Two nights after our triumphant raid, the Indians came to inflict their wrath upon us. They crept in under cover of darkness. They entered our homes, and they dragged us out into the streets, where they butchered us. Where we left many of them alive, they slaughtered, sparing neither women nor children. Where we ransacked their wigwams, they burned our houses to the ground. Where we stole their food, they killed our livestock and our pets. Where we raped their women, they carried those they did not kill off to slavery.

  “It was a massacre, a terrifying raid that all but wiped out our settlement. Those few that remained, had little choice but to leave, joining other communities. But there were few survivors.

  “I was one of them, but my wife and children were not. They were butchered with the rest. I can only guess that I was spared because they believed me dead or dying.

  “As I lay in the burning wreck of my village, left for dead by the native raiding party, I saw the quintet of demons striding through the streets, admiring their handiwork. At first, I thought I was in a fever brought on by my injuries. But they discussed the particulars of their contest so minutely, that I knew this could only be real.

  “It was then I learned that our envy over the Native Americans’ success had been fostered by one of them, and he was congratulated by his peers for the deviltry we had worked on his behalf.

  “Likewise, the group was terribly impressed with the results of the demon who had engendered Wrath in our victims. And they were all five amazed at the results this temptation had rendered.

  “But the fiend who had tempted my village argued that his achievement was greatest. For he had created such a spectacular reaction, that Wrath had been easy to incite. Indeed, he claimed, without his perfect execution of Envy, his associate could not have achieved his results with Wrath.

  “The others agreed and awarded this monster the prize. And I wept as I discovered that all this loss, all this misery, hatred, and death had been for the sole purpose of amusing infernal beings.”

  I continued to stare at him, thunderstruck. I had no idea what to think. It was like he was telling me a ghost story. It couldn’t be true. Could it?

  “Okay, like, I know The Order does a lot to cover things like this up, but I feel like I should have heard about the kind of mass murder you’re describing. Where and when did this happen exactly?”

  “Massachusetts, 1675,” he answered.

  My eyes about fell out of my head and into my French toast. Was he saying what I thought he was?

  “Hold up,” I said. “You’re three hundred years old?”

  My tone made it plain I did not believe him.

  “I am three hundred, seventy-one,” he said.

  I blinked at him, like, six times. He had no grey hair. He had no real wrinkles. There were some worry lines on his forehead and around his eyes, but there was no sign at all this guy wasn’t in his late twenties. I mean, Gerard Dulac was a three-hundred-year-old vampire, and he looked like he was young, but that was . . . that was different. Wasn’t it?

  “How?” I said, unable to articulate the question any better than that.

  Devlin played with this food for a few seconds. When he began speaking again, he refused to meet my gaze.

  “Furious at how we had been manipulated,” he said, “I cried out to Heaven. I demanded justice for this cruel trick. I begged for the opportunity to avenge myself on these fiends.

  “The angel Alara came to me. She told me she could grant my request, but that I would suffer more greatly than I already had. I could imagine no pain worse than what I was feeling, so I agreed.

  “She told me she would make me a demon hunter. She would give me the power to bind demons and to dispatch them.

  “I told her I wanted more than that. I wanted the five who had conceived this vile plan. I wanted to make sure that, whether they were immortal or not, I could vanquish them from existence.

  “She agreed. Those five I can bind to my flesh as a tattoo. Once I have trapped them, I can access their powers. So with each of the five I capture, I become mightier, making it harder for the successive ones to resist.

  “When I have them all, I will die, taking them with me. The world will be free of their influence forever.”

  I still couldn’t wrap my brain around all this. He was immortal until he caught all these demons? He could use their powers? What exactly was this guy? “Demon hunter” didn’t seem to describe it. Despite my experience with the magical world in the last six months, skepticism clutched at my thoughts.

  “You know, I wasn’t exactly a great student,” I said. “In fact, I kinda sucked at it. But something like this – a village committing atrocities against a Native American tribe only to get slaughtered for it – would definitely have caught my attention. And I don’t remember hearing anything about this. Why isn’t this in the history books?”

  “It is, after a fashion. King Phillip’s War from 1675 to 1676 was the bloodiest conflict on American soil in the Seventeenth Century. And it wa
s a turning point in American history. It was won by the colonists and effectively gave them total control over New England.

  “But what happened in my village is only one incident of many. And as it wasn’t the inciting moment of the war, it isn’t examined by scholars.”

  Jesus, I had never heard of this or King Phillip’s War. What the hell had they been teaching me in school? And what exactly had I stepped into this time?

  “And I’m betting this mission you want me to help you with has to do with tracking down one of these demons you’ve been chasing all these years,” I said.

  “Yes. Akashareth. He is the last of them. I’ve captured the other four, but Akashareth has eluded me.

  “And it is he I seek the most. It was he who inspired my village to Envy. It is he who was responsible for the death of my wife and children.”

  Devlin’s face had gone practically black. The hatred and obsession this guy had been feeling for three hundred-some years was dark and thick and dangerous. As a general rule, I don’t scare easy. But this guy made me uncomfortable in a way no one else had.

  “Tell me something,” I said, trying to bleed a little more information out of him, so I could see what was ahead of me. “All this went down in 1675. That’s, like, three hundred fifty years ago.”

  “Three hundred forty-four,” he said.

  “Whatever. It’s three-and-a-half centuries ago. You’ve been looking for these guys ever since?” He nodded. “And you still ain’t found them all? You found that CarFax and tracked it down in a day. How is it this Akasha dude is still on the loose?”

  Devlin smiled thinly at me. He put a bite of egg in his mouth and chewed for several seconds.

  “I see you are not educated on demonology,” he said.

  “No, sorry, that wasn’t on the curriculum in the Cinc— in the public-school system. They taught us math and reading.”

  Devlin nodded sadly, as though my education had been woefully planned. I couldn’t argue with him exactly. My schools were shit. But who the fuck learned about demons except maybe the Catholic-school kids?

  “The carthaax is a brute, a minion,” he explained. “It is clever but not bright. There are millions of such fiends. Most remain on other planes of existence; this one isn’t very hospitable to them. The few that do find their way to Earth either come here by accident, or they are deliberately summoned by some fool seeking power. They wreak mischief briefly before they are noticed and dispatched.

  “Intelligent demons are another matter altogether. Their purpose is to tempt and corrupt. They hide and manipulate behind the scenes. They disguise themselves, so their true nature is not discovered until it is far too late to stop their designs. Sometimes not even then.

  “There are three demonic kingdoms, each with a different goal.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “The Sex-Demon Kingdom, the Power-Demon Kingdom, and the Destroy-Fucking-Everything-Demon Kingdom. I know all about that.”

  “Then you know that a talented demon employs subtlety and guile to accomplish its ends.

  “And demonic lords – the high-ranking members of the kingdoms – are the most insidious. They rarely come to Earth. They move through agents, both infernal and otherwise. They watch their evil take root and blossom from afar, tending it through their minions as a gardener might his flowers.

  “The demons I have pursued, the ones who wrought havoc and death on my village with their caprice, are of this last category. They are extremely powerful, and as modernity advanced they came less and less often to our world.

  “Akashareth is terribly cunning and extremely powerful. He is a Prince in the Kingdom of Abaddon. Finding him and felling him has been no easy task.”

  A cold shiver ran down my spine. Gerard Dulac had been a Duke in the Kingdom of Ashmodei. It was extremely rare for a vampire – for any non-demon – to rise to lordship in a demonic kingdom. Now Devlin wanted me to help get a prince? I didn’t know shit about demonic hierarchy, but if this guy was a prince, then it stood to reason he was just below the king. And Ash had told me Abaddon’s kingdom was the worst of all. They were the monsters that just wanted to destroy everything.

  “It took me years just to learn the names of the five demons I sought,” Devlin was saying. “To know a demon’s name is to have power over it, so they guard their identities zealously. Until I knew for whom I was looking, I had no ability to hunt them.

  “So, yes, Sarah, it has taken me three hundred, forty-four years to find and imprison four of them. And there is yet one more I seek.”

  I frowned. I was seriously beginning to doubt that having this guy teach me was a good idea. First of all, his powers sounded very different from mine, so what could he actually tell me? Second, he had the kind of obsession that made you do stupid things. People who were obsessed only cared about accomplishing their ultimate goal. And people who did stupid things got the folks around them hurt. Or worse. Third, he was depressing. Everything that came out of this guy’s mouth made me want to shoot myself. Did I really need him harshing on me? I was depressed enough.

  “This Akashareth,” I said. “He’s really powerful?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you think I can beat this thing? I don’t even know what I’m doing half the time. I can’t even get my socks to match.”

  “According to you, you can change magic from one form to another. You can undo Akashareth’s intent and turn it back on him. That is powerful sorcery, Sarah. More powerful than anything I have ever encountered. The demon may be mighty, but you are greater.”

  I thought about that. I’d taken out a dragon, which had been kinda simple. He tried to fry me with his fire breath. I turned it into raw killing power and blew out his brain.

  I’d also slain a vampire. Three really. I’d turned their charm into fire bolts and superspeed. And Gerard Dulac was really powerful. He was an old vampire.

  Maybe this was why everyone was so afraid of me. Sassy Kincaide could take your shit away. She could give it back in a way that would kill you.

  I had no idea what the prophecies Ash was always going on about actually said. But according to him, the N’Chai Toroth was supposed to unmake the magical world. It sounded like my power could do that all by itself.

  Maybe if I took out this demon like Devlin wanted me to, word would get out. Maybe people would be like, “Sassy Kincaide took out the dragon D’Krisch Mk’Rai. She fried the vampire Gerard Dulac. Then she killed a demonic prince. We need to leave this bitch alone!”

  I smiled wickedly. I did like the thought of the whole magical world being afraid of me. Who knew? Maybe that would get Ephraim off my ass too.

  “So where are we going?” I asked. “Where is this legendary demonic prince?”

  “I have a lead that suggests there is a cult dedicated to his worship in Denver,” he said. “They allegedly are working to bring him to Earth. It seems unlikely since summoning a demonic prince would take a lot of sorcery and be an egregious breach of The Veil.

  “But it’s the first whiff I’ve had of his trail in almost four years. Even if they aren’t hoping to bring him to Earth, if they exist, I may be able to track him down at last.”

  “If that’s true, what were you doing in Chicago?” I asked.

  I had a suspicious mind to begin with, and now that I was on the run, I needed to make sure I wasn’t opening myself up to the ultimate betrayal.

  “As I said, I detected the carthaax in Indiana. A monster like that should not be allowed to wreak harm on this world. So I diverted my path to pursue it. I had been en route to Denver before.”

  I nodded. I could see it.

  “So, a cult of demon worshippers,” I mused. “What a bunch of saps. People will believe in anything, won’t they?”

  “They will if it gives them comfort or power,” Devlin replied.

  True. This was how assholes got elected. And innocents got duped.

  “So what’s the plan?”

  “Amtrak’s California Zephyr line r
uns from here to Denver,” he said. “It leaves at two PM. We should be on it.”

  “Seems good,” I said. “But first, this stuffed French toast ain’t gonna eat itself.”

  I returned to my food. It tasted good again. Devlin was worrisome. I still feared he hadn’t told me everything, especially since the little girl in my dream said he had a secret he couldn’t share.

  But that was a problem to figure out on the trip. If he could teach me how to use my powers, and I could slay this demon for him, I would put myself in a strong position to get The Order, Ephraim, and everyone in the magical world the hell off my back.

  Ephraim

  E phraim barely had time to avoid the behemoth’s punch. It sprang from its spot on a rock, landed next to him, and drove its fist into the stone, narrowly missing his ribs.

  It roared its dissatisfaction as Ephraim scrambled to his feet. The fiend followed with an enormous uppercut that caught Ephraim in the chest and knocked him airborne. He sailed backward, hit the rocky ground, and skidded to a stop. The demon shook its hand in pain.

  What the hell was he supposed to do here? The thing was enormous – at least twice his size. Like most infernal creatures, it had bright-red skin and black hair. Its body was a mass of muscle, and it sported black ram horns on its skull that were easily large enough to butt with. It had a gargantuan mouth that took up half its face. Ephraim thought it might be able to fit his whole head inside that maw.

  It growled like some monstrous bear and stalked towards him purposefully.

  Shit. Ephraim jumped to his feet again. He was still panting from his ordeal in the sea of acid. He scanned the area quickly. There was nothing he could use for a weapon.

  Falling back on his military training, he told himself to relax. The demon might be bigger and stronger, but he was armored. It couldn’t hurt him. Right?

  He dropped into a fighting stance as the beast approached. It smiled, showing him three rows of pointed, yellow teeth.

  Then it raised a giant fist and drove it down towards Ephraim’s head. He slipped the strike easily and countered with a reverse punch to the thing’s kidney – assuming it had kidneys; Ephraim wasn’t familiar with this particular breed of demon.